The police officers are charged with Exceeding and Abuse of Official Powers, Official Forgery, Robbery, and Storage of Drugs.

The trial of six officers of the Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs No. 70 begins in the Nevsky District Court of St. Petersburg. The defendants include Deputy Head of police station No. 70 Artem Morozov, Senior Operative Officer Andrey Barashkov, operatives Kirill Borodich, Mikhail Antonenko, Aleksandr Ipatov, and Sergey Kotenko. Depending on the role in committing the crime, each of them has been charged with (part 2 of Art. 292 of the Russian Criminal Code), Abuse of Official Powers (part 1 of Art. 285) and Exceeding Official Powers (part 3 of Art. 286), Robbery (Art. 161), as well as Illegal Storage of Firearms and Drug Substances (part 1 of Art. 222 and 1 of Art. 228 of the Russian Criminal Code).

After the indictment was read out, the former police officers said that the charges were “clear to them,” but none of them pleaded guilty Kommersant reports. They promised to provide their version of what happened after the prosecution presented evidence.

The grounds for the search was an incident with the detention of 26-year-old Aleksey Shepelin. In April 2017, Antonenko, Borodich, Kotenko, and Morozov detained a suspect of illegal storage and sale of drugs on Solidarnosti Avenue in St. Petersburg. Since Shepelin resisted the officers during the detention, he was beaten and brought to the police department. Operatives continued to abuse the detainee, hitting him with truncheons, torturing him with electric shock, and burning his nostrils with a cigarette. Also, they broke his glasses, and the shards of glass hit him in the eyes. According to the investigation, the police officers forged documents to bring Shelepin to criminal justice for the illegal sale of drugs and made him sign the protocol. Later, he went to a medical institution, where he verified battery-induced injuries and wrote a statement about torture against the police officers.

Then the investigation found that a month later, Morozov, Kotenko, and Ipatov came to the bookmaker's office on Dybenko Street. They ransacked the place and tore the passports of the visitors that were inside. After that, the law enforcers detained Zamir Abdulkamalov, the guard, and brought him to the police station. They began to torture the man, forcing him to admit to buying up property obtained by criminal means. Also, to the application of physical force, they poured boiling water on the detainee and did not allow him to take off the wet clothes. Despite the tortures, the police officers failed to obtain the necessary testimony from the guard, so they released him.

A year ago, the police station No. 70 was searched by FSB officers, after which all six policemen suspected of tortures were detained.